PARIS: A French court on Wednesday convicted 14 people of crimes ranging from financing terrorism to membership of a criminal gang in relation to attacks in 2015 against the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine and a Jewish supermarket.

The trial has reopened one of modern France’s darkest episodes, just as another wave of Islamist attacks on home soil this autumn, including the beheading of a schoolteacher, prompted the government to crack down on what it calls Islamist separatism.

Brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi stormed Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris, spraying gunfire and killing 12, on Jan 7, 2015, nearly a decade after the weekly published cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him).

A third attacker, Amedy Coulibaly, killed a police woman and then four Jewish hostages in a kosher supermarket in a Paris suburb. Like the Kouachis, Coulibaly was killed in a shootout with police.

Among the 14 accomplices sentenced on Wednesday was Hayat Boumeddiene, a former partner of Coulibaly and one of three defendants tried in absentia. Believed to be still alive and on the run from an international arrest warrant, prosecutors referred to her as an “Islamic State princess”.

The judges convicted Boumeddiene, 32, of financing terrorism and belonging to a criminal terrorist network, and sentenced her to 30 years in jail.

Three of the 14 fled to Syria just ahead of the Jan 7-9, 2015 attacks in Paris, which left 17 dead along with the three gunmen who claimed the killings in the name of Al Qaida and the IS group. The other 11, all men, formed a circle of friends and prison acquaintances who claimed any facilitating they may have done was unwitting or for more run-of-the mill crime like armed robbery: weapons stashed in a zipped duffel that few would admit to opening, vehicles, communications, and a short-term rental apartment scouted as a hideout.

One gambled day and night during the three-day period, learning what had happened only after emerging blearily from the casino. Another was a pot-smoking ambulance driver. A third was a childhood friend of the market attacker, who got beaten to a pulp by the latter after going into debt.

It was the coronavirus infection of Ali Riza Polat, described as the lieutenant of the virulently anti-Semitic market attacker, Amdy Coulibaly, that forced the suspension of the trial for a month. Polat’s profane outbursts and insults drew rebukes from the chief judge. A handwriting expert testified it was Polat who scrawled a price list of arms and munitions linked to the attack. The minimum sentence requested by prosecutors is five years.

In all, investigators sifted through 37 million bits of phone data, according to video testimony by judicial police. Among the men cuffed behind the courtrooms enclosed stands, flanked by masked and armed officers, were several who had exchanged texts or calls with Coulibaly in the days leading up to the attack. They described any contacts as normal communications among acquaintances.

Among those testifying were the widows of Chrif and Sad Kouachi, the brothers who stormed Charlie Hebdo’s offices on Jan 7, 2015, decimating the newspapers’ editorial staff in what they said was an act of vengeance for its publication of caricatures years before.

Published in Dawn, December 17th, 2020